Yard Sale Treasures

On Saturday morning Nathan and I went to a neighborhood community yard sale, in which a few dozen homes all hosted simultaneous sales. It's a rather wealthy community, so we correctly suspected that we might find some deals worth having on things we'd need when we move into our house IN EIGHT DAYS!

(Did I mention that WE'RE MOVING a week from tomorrow?)

Please forgive the terrible photos. Every surface in our house is covered in moving boxes or piles of things waiting to be packed into boxes (Oh, by the way, WE BOUGHT A HOUSE and WE'RE MOVING REALLY SOON!) and there's no available space for picture-taking. But such as they are, here are the items we found:

Starbucks Barista Zia espresso machine. Retail value: $275. Yard sale price: $5.

Wooden quilt rack. With a fresh coat of paint, this is going to have a place in our bedroom to drape clothes over when we're too lazy to hang them up display the handmade quilt I'm going to make some day.

Wooden shelf. This will also be getting a new paint treatment, and maybe some new hooks as well. The quilt rack and the shelf were $8 combined. The lady was trying to get $15, but I stood there looking uncertain until she lowered the price a couple of times. Heehee.

Two glass jars. $1 apiece, picked up in two different yards. These will find homes in the bathroom and/or the kitchen.

Three old glass milk bottles. $0. I plan to use them as vases!

Four new IKEA chairs ("Jokkmokk"). Not even assembled yet when I walked away with the set for $10.

Wood pedestal for potted plant. $5. In retrospect I wish I had put in a lower offer for this, but then again, we got this in the same yard as the espresso machine, so maybe the two deals even out somehow. I'll probably refinish this at some point.

The Joy of Cooking. Now that I have this, I think I have all the "staple" cookbooks that everyone should really have. The price tag says $4, but I offered $2 and got it.

Three interior design books, including Pottery Barn Home. The Pottery Barn book alone is usually around $15 I think; I got all three books for $5.


Total spent: $38. Not bad considering the useful things we got, but I think in the future I'll be braver about haggling for lower prices. This was only my first time garage-saleing, after all... I'll improve with practice, I'm sure!